1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of creating an interactive video experience in mobile web browsers that do not support embedded video playback in the browser.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets, have become prevalent in recent years. Given the enormous and fast-growing market, mobile advertising has become a fast-developing and far-reaching industry. In addition to traditional media, such as text banners or posters, a growing trend in mobile advertising is to include rich media within the ads. For example, interactive video that can be played and expanded to a full screen, offering advertisers a better way to communicate their message and attract viewers' engagements. In the context of application development (in-app) for smart phone and tablet devices, interactive video is traditionally generated with an accompanying hypertext markup language (HTML) overlay which contains visible (opaque) elements arranged over a transparency. Both the video and the overlay run in the same application context, with the application playing the video while placing the HTML overlay on top of the video. The visible elements of the overlay may be buttons or any elements that respond to user's touch or gesture, and once tapped by user, perform other actions or invoke different applications.
However, HTML5-capable mobile browsers on many smart phones do not support this use of an overlay to build interactive video. This is because the video is immediately passed by the browser to the native media player. The native media player runs outside the application context of the mobile browser (though it may pass some video events back to the browser). Because the media player is instantiated outside of the browser application context at the top of the view-stack, there is no way for the browser to place a traditional HTML overlay above the running video. Neither have the media players the capability to insert such an overlay into the video themselves.